10 best electric toothbrushes tried and tested for brighter, healthier teeth

The best affordable electric toothbrush Oral-B makes, the Pro 3 is noticeably less powerful than the iO range but will essentially clean your teeth just as competently as the more expensive brushes, with all their techy bells and whistles. It has everything you really need and none of the frills: it’s compatible with the standard Oral-B brush heads, it has a timer with 30 second pacing buzzes, three modes, a pressure sensor and a two week battery life.

Those modes are daily clean (ie. standard speed), sensitive (ie. slower oscillations), and the promising-sounding whitening mode. The whitening mode appears across the entire Oral-B range (and on lots of similar brushes), but as you might suspect it’s not actually whitening your teeth. Instead it uses the last 20 seconds of your cleaning timer to instruct you to “buff” your front teeth with increasingly fast oscillations, in theory polishing them up for a brighter smile.

In our tests there was no discernible difference to the appearance of our teeth using either mode, but like other brushes in our list the Oral-B Pro 3 left our teeth with that trademark “just been to the dentist” feeling. The lack of an accompanying “smart” app means you can happily watch TikToks on your phone while you brush, too, like normal people.

This budget-level offering in the Sonicare range is a simple triple-A battery powered brush that combines the usual Sonicare brush head and W-shaped bristles with a sleek, contoured handle that’s pleasant to hold and offers good grip. With just a two-minute timer and a pacer to let you know when to switch sides and one mode of brushing, this is a simple, effective and very portable brush that still offers the deep clean that we expect from Philips Sonicare technology.

Whereas regular electric toothbrushes are destined to spend most of their existence in a landfill, Suri aims to be the world’s most sustainable electric toothbrush, by using parts that are more easily recycled or repaired. The corn-starch toothbrush heads, for example, can be returned to Suri for composting – just pop them in a freepost envelope.

While we can’t measure the impact of Suri’s green mission, we’re definitely on board with the concept, which is made all the easier because the toothbrush itself is one of the best we’ve tested. It looks sleek and stylish, is compact, has an optional self-cleaning case and an optional magnetic mount for storing it on your bathroom mirror. Even the matching charging dock has been well designed to fit in with bathroom decor.

Battery life lasts about a month between charges, and the 33,000 sonic vibrations per second give a comprehensive clean without the added fuss of an app or a fancy on-brush display. Suri is a highly recommended electric toothbrush, even if you absolutely despise the environment.

There’s a lot to like about this sonic brush, starting with the price, which also includes three replacement heads. Unobtrusive design and a nicely proportioned handle means that it looks and feels like a premium brush, and its three brushing modes will be enough to deliver on a range of oral hygiene goals, whether that’s keeping your dentist happy at your next check-up or gradually whitening teeth for a healthy smile.

In operation, it doesn’t feel harsh on gums although there’s no warning light to tell you that you’re brushing too hard, which might be a concern if you’re usually a little heavy-handed with your dental hygiene. It’s also fitted with a quality battery, and we found that the brush only needed one top-up charge in the month that it was on test.

The Philips Sonicare 9900 Prestige is an exceptionally smart-looking electric toothbrush. It’s giving Kendall Roy vibes, the kind of brush you might whip out of a Tom Ford washbag in the bathroom of a Learjet. It comes in two shades, champagne and midnight blue, and includes a stylish and compact pleather travel case that doubles as a USB-C charger.

Unlike other premium brushes the Sonicare 9900 doesn’t feature anything as gauche as a digital screen or a slate of on-brush controls (besides your basic three-levels of intensity). Instead you pick your settings in the accompanying app, which makes sense considering how rarely we switch between brushing modes. The brush then remembers your preferences and the app will alert you if you’re going too hard, or if it thinks there’s a better mode for you.

If you, quite reasonably, don’t want to faff around with a toothbrushing app, the Sonicare 9900 is still smart enough by itself, automatically dropping down a gear to a gentler brushing intensity if it senses you’re putting too much pressure on your gums. The decent two-week battery life rounds off an excellent brush package. While at full price the Sonicare 9900 is expensive, it’s a hard recommend if you can spot it during one of its regular discount windows.

One step down from the all-singing, all-dancing, all bank account-draining Oral-B iO10 (was £799.99, now £476.99 Currys.co.uk), the less expensive Oral-B iO9 impresses with its pleasing design and LED graphics that denote which one of the seven modes you’re currently rocking.

The oscillating action feels like it’s cleaning the teeth very thoroughly, although if you have sensitive teeth it’s definitely worth cleaning in that mode to make sure you aren’t aggravating teeth and gums. Our brace-wearing, teenage tester found that the oscillating action seemed to produce much better results for clearing and cleaning braces compared to sonic brushes, with the action of the brush head particularly suited to loosening food left behind after eating.

Oral-B’s excellent app backs up the brush’s performance, so if you do have time and are interested in utilising all the tech to improve your technique, then you will be able to really fine-tune your brushing regime to get the most out of the brush and value for money.

Read the full Oral-B iO9 review

The Oral-B iO4 is the cheapest entry-level brush in the iO range, and we rate it one of the best in terms of value. While the rest of the iO series is defined by the little digital display adorning the handle (and that buzzword, “artificial intelligence”) the iO4 pares things back to basics with a simple power button for switching between modes.

Despite this the iO4 retains the most essential smarts of the more expensive brushes, with an LED pressure warning, the usual buzzing timers and accompanying app which lets you choose one of four brushing modes. It also comes with a travel case, though not a recharging one.

The simplicity of the iO4 works out great if you’re not bothered about using the app regularly: just set it up once and your mouth is on easy street. It’s less useful if you want to share the handle with somebody else who has different brushing preferences. For that, take a look at the Oral-B iO5 (£159.90, Amazon.co.uk), which also strips out the display but has on-handle buttons to quickly switch between modes.

In terms of design, the Ordo looks similar to a Sonicare brush and it performs like one too with the 40,000 sonic pulses per minute that it delivers giving a very satisfactory clean. There are four brushing modes to choose from and a timer gives you plenty of control over how the brush performs. We really liked the W-shaped profile of the bristles in the head too, which seemed to make it easier to get to all the exposed tooth surfaces.

The brush head also has a cross in the middle of the bristles, made from silicone, which helps whiten and polish the teeth as you brush, and all our testers felt that this addition was very effective in getting rid of longer-term stains. However, there is no pressure sensor, so if that’s something that you particularly need in order to brush efficiently, then this might not be the brush for you. But the battery life was even better than claimed – roughly four weeks, rather than three.

Look a little further down the Oral-B iO series and you’ll find the mid-range Oral-B iO6, which we still really like because it offers many of the features of the flagship brushes in the range at a less bruising price point.

It’s a little chunkier to hold than its stablemates, but this might actually suit some brushers who find the slender designs a little slippery while brushing. The signature, round oscillating head is powered by five brushing modes and the brush still links up with Oral-B’s excellent app, which can give you insights into your brushing performance, as long as you put in the time with it.

The pressure sensor, timer and pacer all give real-time feedback as you brush, and the battery life is enough to get you through a week of cleaning before you have to think about docking it on the charger for a couple of hours.

In terms of functionality and features, the more inexpensive Oral-B Genius X doesn’t differ all that much from the premium iO range, especially when compared to the entry-level iO4 and iO5 brushes. The Genius X uses a similar oscillating round brush head (amusingly called “dentist inspired”, whatever that means) and includes an LED pressure sensor, six cleaning modes and a two week battery life. It lacks the quiter, less buzzy motor of the advanced iO brushes.

The app has a smart coaching feature, which tracks how well you brush over time and gives you tips on how to improve your technique. We generally think these apps are over-complicating something we do at least twice a day for our entire lives, but they’re a good way to kick any bad habits you might not realise you’ve fallen into.

The clincher for the Genius X is that it’s the most advanced Oral-B electric toothbrush to use the standard Oral-B brush heads. Whereas the iO range uses special heads costing £15 at full price, the Genius X uses heads costing as little as around £4 each.